


Ardently

by uniqueinalltheworld



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Kidfic, M/M, Multi, Unplanned Pregnancy, spoilers through adamant for DAI, spoilers through end of DAII
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-14
Updated: 2015-12-14
Packaged: 2018-05-06 14:44:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5421008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uniqueinalltheworld/pseuds/uniqueinalltheworld
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Marian Hawke decided to leave her children with responsible adults before helping the inquisition, she had counted on being able to find one somewhere. Unfortunately, it seems like Anders and Fenris will have to do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ardently

**Author's Note:**

> This work was written based on [this playlist](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ym1J5IAk2P4&list=PLRQPlGox-vRwXhPQQ3oNPBu4TaajWbk0N) for TheRealFrankenBerry for the 2015 Dragon Age Reverse Big Bang. Check out her amazing cover art below!

* * *

Marian Hawke, the as of thirty minutes ago anointed champion of Kirkwall, fell to her knees and vomited all over the smoldering wreckage of Lowtown.

Isabela witnessed, rubbing her back and stroking her sweat-soaked hair. “There now, sweet thing. It’s all right. Did the Arishok hit you?”

“If he did it would have been your fault,” Hawke managed, still heaving.

Isabela chuckled and held a hand out to help her stand. “True. I suppose I owe you a drink. Or hundred. Come on, the Hanged Man’s still standing.”

This was going to get complicated more quickly than Hawke had thought. Then again, if she could trust any of her friends to hide something and not to pass judgement…. “I’ll have to wait to take you up on that drink.”

“That eager for a bath?”

Hawke shook her head, meeting Isabela’s eyes. “I’ll have to wait about nine more months.”

“Oh,” said Isabela.

“Yeah,” said Hawke.

“Oh shit.”

* * *

Isabela returned from the counter at the Hanged Man carrying two mugs of ale.

“I was under the impression you understood when I said I couldn’t drink away these memories for nine months,” Hawke drawled.

“Oh, I understood, sweetling. They’re both for me.”

“Can’t fault you for that,” Hawke mumbled. Her cuts still stung and bled sluggishly. Anders had told her once that anemia came standard with pregnancy. Funny that he’d never mentioned how that might affect one’s blood magic. Funny how duels to the death tended to make highly noticeable any subtle changes in one’s ability to do blood magic.

“Tell me,” Isabela straddled a chair and faced her companion. “You weren’t getting all sweaty with Anders until recently. How exactly did this happen?”

* * *

Fenris stood staring into the fire, fully clothed and armored. Of course he was armored. Silly Marian, to think that there was even a second in which Fenris might not be armored.

“Was it that bad?” She asked, smiling. She knew it wasn’t bad. It had been… well. Nice. Nice was a good word for it. Incredible was another. Gentle. Mind-blowing. She was pretty sure she had cried. She was pretty sure _Fenris_ had cried. It was possible that she had briefly seen the Maker. Or at least parts of Him.

“I’m sorry… it’s not… it was fine.” He sighed. “No, that is insufficient. It was better than anything I could have dreamed.” But then there was also “I’m sorry” and “I can’t do this” and “forgive me” and then Fenris left and then he never came back.

* * *

Hawke answered her. “Merrill and I made it by accident. Blood ritual gone wrong. It’s probably a desire demon.”

“Of course it is.” Isabela raised one eyebrow and drained her first tankard.

“I’m a virgin chosen to be the next bride of the Maker and carry His mortal child.”

Isabela snorted.

“What? I’m virtuous. Sort of. I could be. If I tried.”

Hawke tried again. “It’s Varric’s. Well, actually, it’s Bianca’s, but you know how he gets.”

“I’m more willing to believe that the Maker tumbled you personally than I am Varric letting anyone touch his crossbow.”

Hawke sighed. “Yeah I didn’t really think that one would work out. But I did try. That’s what matters. And when I said it I sounded terribly earnest.”

“Of course you did, sweetling. Now,” Isabela looked Marian over, those wicked, card shark eyes lingering on her stomach. “Presuming you intend to keep the thing, how are we going to hide this?”

When her child was grown, Hawke thought silently, she would explain to them that this conversation—this one right here—was why she had nearly bled to death fighting the Qunari Arishok in a duel to save their Aunt Isabela.

* * *

“Anders, I think I might have something to tell you.”

“I’m listening. Just finishing this paragraph.” He didn’t look up from his manifesto, ink-tainted fingers moving the quill across the parchment.

“It’s sort of a large thing. Or… well, it’s not currently a large thing. But I suppose it would get large. You know, if we allowed it to be….”

“Is this a mage thing?”

“No, not a mage thing, er, it’s really more of an ‘us’ thing.” Hawke’s fingers twisted in the hem of her shirt.

“Ah.” The quill continued scratching. “Just give me a moment, then.” He glanced up briefly to smile at her.

Anders was a good man. Hawke knew this deep in her heart. He worked tirelessly. Not just for her, or just for mages, but for everyone. Elves. Refugees. He even walked her mabari on occasion. There was just a part of her, the same small part that gave helpful suggestions like “let’s have cake for dinner” or “what if this time we just let Kirkwall sort out its own nonsense,” that wanted Anders to be just _her_ good man sometimes.

It was about then that Hawke’s head began swirling and she rushed to the privy. Again. To vomit up the contents of her stomach. And possibly the organ itself. And her spleen. Again. “Anders,” she called weakly when she was done, “Is it possible for a person to have two spleens?”

“Not usually. Why?” He called loudly from the writing desk.

“I think I just threw mine up.”

There was a loud clattering and the tinkle of spilled ink before Anders rushed to her side. “Are you all right? Do you need healing? Let me—“ He held out a glowing blue hand.

Hawke shook her head vigorously. She had never been much of a healer herself, and she wasn’t sure what one might find if they attempted to ease her symptoms now. She could not explain either why it was suddenly such a terribly important thing that Anders not find out. He was a good man. Surely he wouldn’t be angry about things that had happened before they were even together. Surely he would still—Well. He was a good man.

There was nothing left in Hawke’s body to dispose of. She had long since thrown up Orana’s stew and the bread that went with it. She heaved weakly and allowed Anders to stroke her between the shoulder blades.

“There now,” he murmured. “Sure I can’t at least check you out? Can’t have the Champion of Kirkwall succumbing to disease.” Ah, and there was the other problem.

“I’m sure.”

“Now what was it you wanted to tell me?” He asked, looking at her with those tired, tired eyes.

“I—“ Hawke sighed and rubbed her face. That tiny, selfish part of her was screaming. “I—“ she tried to shape her mouth around the things she had been trying to say. She kept thinking about the statue they were erecting of her in Lowtown. The one with her all decked out in Templar armor. She thought about the manifesto on Anders’ writing desk, his ink-stained fingers. Hawke took a deep breath. Allowed the selfish part to win. “Anders, we need to talk.”

Anders was a good man. Hawke believed this in her heart of hearts. And Anders was in love with the Champion of Kirkwall.

* * *

Hawke fled from her mansion and slammed the door, breathing hard. Frankly, she wanted to vomit again. Or cry. Or both. Anders had not had any way to know. How could he possibly understand when she hadn't explained anything to him?

She tried the deep breathing exercise Merrill had taught her. It didn't help. Or, more accurately, she could only take shallow breaths so it hardly mattered if it helped. She was dizzy and sick and it was horrible. Why had no one ever told her this would happen when you got pregnant? In the stories it was always, "Oh I'm pregnant! Oh happy day!" and then cut to nine months later. Ugh. Nine months—or really seven months at this point—from now she would be in labor. And wouldn't that make fighting the Arishok look like a tea party.

Hawke snickered a little at her own mental image. It almost made everything worthwhile to think about seeing the Arishok in pink frilly gloves and one of those big hats. Maybe they could arrange to have a portrait commissioned. They could hang it up over that place where she'd accidentally put a fireball through the wall of the chantry during the fighting.

"So," a voice interrupted her panic attack. "Did Blondie tell _you_ why he's dragging us into the sewers for ingredients I'm apparently not supposed to know are used in bomb making?"

Ah yes. Company. Hawke loved company. She was a people person really. She also loved explosions. Her company seemed to be trying to communicate with her about explosions. Fascinating, really. Wonderful. She was ecstatic. She also seemed to be sliding down her own manor wall.

“He and I aren’t really on speaking terms at the moment. We’re more on, ‘I’ll just go wait outside while you get your shit out of my house and back to that cesspit in Darktown terms at the moment if you catch my drift.” Maker, but that was quite a bit of talking. Had she ever noticed how much air talking takes before? The effort was so much. Was she still sliding down the wall? The world was moving but she felt as if she had come to a complete stop.

"Hawke?" Varric's expression switched from joking to concerned.

"You seem taller than usual," Hawke commented idly.

"That's because you're sitting on the ground, Hawke."

Hawke nodded. "It's quite comfortable."

"I'm sure." Varric did not look convinced. In fact, he had that patient look on his face. The one he always got when they were playing Diamondback and he knew Hawke was bluffing, but was going to wait for her to give him even more of her money before he called her on it. Frustrating, that look.

“It is! Also, I think I may be having a panic attack. Just a small one, though. Not to worry.”

“Of course.” Distantly, Hawke was aware of Varric sliding his arms under her armpits and hauling her upright. She would have to remember to be surprised at his strength later. “Come on, Hawke. Let’s get you to a healer.”

“Not Anders,” she mumbled.

“Not Anders,” Varric agreed.

* * *

Varric had never quite managed to get Merrill out of the habit of throwing her door in the alienage wide open at the first hint of a knock. He would have tried harder, but it really was endearing and it wasn’t as if Daisy couldn’t handle herself.

“Oh,” said Merrill, taking in Varric, red faced and panting, Hawke slung across both his shoulders, her legs and arms dragging on the ground on either side. “Well, I suppose you might want a drink, then. I have… water.” She stepped aside to allow the pair of them into her apartment.

“You never call me Champion, Merrill,” Hawke slurred from Varric’s back. “Why is that?”

“Oh, was I supposed to?” Merrill asked. “I can start if you like. I just assumed since we’d been calling you Hawke this whole time—“

Hawke flapped a dangling hand at Merrill while Varric hefted her onto the rough wooden table. “I took her to the Hanged Man to calm down and she got inside, said she had to tell me something, hyperventilated, and passed out.”

“Well that doesn’t sound right,” said Merrill, frowning and eyeing Hawke’s mostly-limp form. “Usually she has at least six ales before she hyperventilates and falls unconscious.”

Varric shrugged. “She’s had a rough day. Well, few months... You know, let’s just round it off a little and say decade.”

“I need to see not-Anders,” Hawke mumbled.

“Does she mean Justice?” Merrill asked. “I don’t normally enjoy seeing him. Though he’s quite nice for a spirit. I’m sure he could be lovely company if he didn’t come out solely when we were killing people.”

“She means a healer,” Varric answered.

“Oh, er… I’m not really much of a healer. But I do know someone who is!” Merrill peered over the woman on her kitchen table. “Hawke? Do you think you can make it to Sundermont?”

* * *

Keeper Marethari shooed both Varric and Merrill out of the healer’s tent…boat…aravel… thing, for which Hawke was grateful. She wasn’t certain that she could stand much more of Merrill’s frantic worry or Varric’s gently concerned gaze. Also, she sort of wanted to eat the ironbark that had been laying around on the craft table. And that definitely wasn’t right. She had just gone out and picked a great cartload of that three months ago. Surely then ironbark hadn’t seemed so edible.

“Varric’ll be eavesdropping outside,” Hawke mumbled. She had come back to herself somewhat, the fresh air on the brisk elf-supported walk to Sundermont doing her good.

“He’ll be trying to,” Marethari confirmed. She drew an odd, crackling glyph in the air. It seemed to have no effect on Hawke or their surroundings but a moment later she heard Varric’s distinctive yelp.

“You have to teach me that.”

Marethari almost smiled. “Another time, perhaps. For now we should take a look at you.”

“I’m afraid I’m pregnant,” Hawke told the older woman. “I seem to be rather bad at it. I’m fainting and vomiting everywhere. Also I want to eat your ironbark.”

“It may run in your family.”

Hawke shrugged. She had been too young to remember whether or not mother had a hard time with Bethany and Carver and it was hardly as if she could just step into the beyond and ask any of them now. “It’s possible.”

“May I?” Keeper Marethari gestured to her shirt hem and Hawke nodded. The keeper pulled the cloth up with cool fingers before returning to Hawke’s stomach, pressing her with hands that glowed soft and green. “Well, despite the difficulties you are having, both of them appear to be quite healthy. Almost concerningly healthy, if you wish the truth.”

Hawke’s hand shot out, wrapping around the keeper’s still-glowing wrist like a vice. “Both of them?”

* * *

“So,” said Varric at long last. “Are you going to keep it?” He, Merrill, Hawke, and Isabela had made it back to the Hanged Man. Merrill and Varric for drinks and an explanation, and Isabela for, well, Hawke supposed it depended on your exact definition of “moral support.” The pirate enjoyed Hawke’s suffering, at least.

“What, the ale?” Hawke asked. “Of course. I can’t drink for a few months, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy the aroma of stale rat piss. Plus, I have a reputation to maintain.”

“He means the baby, sweet thing.”

Okay, so, perhaps, when Hawke said she was telling her friends everything, she had left out one or two small details. And they were small details, really. Just because they would grow into significantly larger details that cried and pooped didn’t mean… well. There were some things, Hawke had learned, that she simply wanted to keep all her own. She could not explain to herself why this was one of them.

“There’s quite a few options, if you’d prefer not to be pregnant. My clan has this herbal tea. You drink it and… poof! Well, it’s not really a poof so much as a lot of painful cramping and—“

Isabela clamped a hand over Merrill’s mouth. “She means we’ll support you, if that’s your decision.”

“It makes more sense,” added Varric. “Pressures of being Champion of Kirkwall with no Viscount, no fami—father in the picture to share the burden….”

Hawke glanced down at her hands, wrapped around the mug of ale, at their yellowing nail beds. They would get worse before they got better, Marethari had told her. They were quite likely to split and bleed and crack. She didn’t have to deal with this. She could chose to be something else. Something… not a mother. She bit her lip. “I’ve made a lot of foolish decisions in my life,” she said slowly, “most of which I’ve regretted, but I don’t think this will be one of them.”

Varric recovered first. “Well, then let’s drink to baby Hawke then.”

Isabela raised her glass. “To a new generation of blood mage.”

Merrill clinked. “Is it going to be a blood mage, Hawke? Can you tell?”

Hawke shrugged. “It’ll be a baby, Merrill. That’s all I need to know.”

The elf beamed. “And you’ll be a mother.”

“I suppose I will.”

* * *

“Shit,” Varric said, surveying the wreckage surrounding the red lyrium statue. “This is worse than the Arishok.”

“Well,” said Hawke, doing something that wound up being less about wiping her face and more a method of smearing soot and blood around into a more aesthetically pleasing pattern. “At least we got rid of that wall I scorched.”

“So where are we going now, Hawke?” Varric, who had a nickname for everyone, never called Hawke “champion,” She was going to miss him.

“We’ll have to split up, I suppose. Not much of a way around it. Half of us are apostates and the other half are wanted criminals who helped incite a rebellion.”

Varric nodded. “I’ll get Rivaini, Broody, and Daisy, you let Aveline know where we’re going and we’ll all rendezvous at that one slaver cave we cleared out on the Wounded Coast.” He said it all like them meeting back up was the most natural thing in the world. Like they would always be a family. Hawke almost had a moment in which she believed it.

“Of course. I’ll get Anders and Aveline and meet you all there.”

If Varric noticed her pointed inclusion of Anders, he said nothing. “I’ll see you soon,” she said and kissed him on the forehead. The blood on her lips felt tacky and wrong against Varric’s ashy skin, but it was better than nothing. She turned then, and dragged her staff up the steps to the ruins of the Viscount’s old office.

* * *

Varric wished he could say he was surprised when Aveline showed up, a short note from Hawke, but no actual Marian in hand.

He sighed. She deserved some rest. And if there ever came a time he _really_ needed her, he knew where to find her. He was probably the only one who did.

* * *

There was a medium-sized cottage a day’s ride from the city of Kirkwall, just off the path to a small village who didn’t get news much, certainly had no idea what anyone with the word “champion” in front of her name might look like.

It was here that Hawke had hidden away her two little girls. This tiny hamlet, where she responded only to “mama” and never to “champion.” Where the people minded their own business and didn’t bother with any nonsense one way or another about blood magic. Hawke placed the short silver knife, the one she used on herself because it was so sharp that in the heat of battle she hardly noticed its drag across her flesh, on a high shelf well out of the reach of curious toddlers. She supposed she would clean it off later. She would also have to clean off her staff. And her armor. And her hair.

On second thought, she closed the cottage door as quietly as she knew how, drew a bucket of water from the small well Varric had had built in her yard just before she moved in, and doused herself several times while fully clothed.

When she went back inside, she could hear the thumping of two pairs of tiny, stumbling feet running to greet her and, for the first time since the Chantry exploded, Marian Hawke smiled.

* * *

Varric sighed heavily before he knocked on the cottage door. He had written, of course. But then he had been captured by a certain seeker and then dragged across the ass end of Thedas while the fucking sky exploded. And so he hadn’t had much time recently for letters.

He also had not yet actually met Hawke’s daughter. She had been remarkably circumspect about the child, only telling Varric via letters that “the brood” was doing well, so it was something of a surprise to him when a four foot tall barefoot version of Marian Hawke answered the door at the second knock, appraised him with a glance, and then ran off into the house without so much as nodding.

Varric could just make out the conversation happening in one of the back rooms of the little house:

“Mama, mama! There’s a man here to see you!”

“Did you ask his name?”

“No.”

A sigh. “What did he look like?”

“He was short!”

“A dwarf?”

“Like Messeres Bodhan and Sandal?”

“Yes, like them.”

“I think so. But he didn’t bring his beard with him.”

“Did he have a great big contraption on his back?”

“It was shiny, like your staff. But it had buttons everywhere. But I think he’s waiting for you, mama. He’s still at the door.”

“I suppose we ought to go meet this beardless rapscallion, then, hadn’t we?”

Marian Hawke rounded the corner, her child on her hip. She looked a bit older, but her face was somehow less tired, less careworn, and despite everything Varric felt himself grinning at the sight of her. She still wore light armor, though she had carefully chosen the pieces to make it look no more out of place than any other peasant hunter’s outfit. The staff leaning by her door had also been dressed down, though Varric would recognize the blighted thing anywhere. Plain leather wrapping covered many of its more ornamental bits and a false wooden cap was laid over the focusing crystal at its tip.

“Varric Tethras. Is this what it takes to get you to come visit me? The sky exploding?”

“I would have come sooner but I was delayed by… let’s call it ‘Divine intervention.’”

Hawke caught him in a crushing, one-armed hug. “Come in,” she said. “Lucy’s been dying to meet her Uncle Varric.”

The child tucked under Hawke’s left arm grinned.

* * *

Hawke’s daughter played with soap bubbles while they talked. Or, at least she was doing something to them. With a wave of her hands she could make them glow with brilliantly colored light or even smell like roses. Once, with a tight frown of concentration, Lucy even managed to make a bubble square. The shape lasted only for an instant before vanishing with a sharp pop and Lucy’s gusty sigh. “I don’t see why I can’t practice the same kind of magic you do, mama. It looks much easier.”

It had been so long since Varric had seen Marian without her trademark blood smear that he had forgotten how much easier it was to detect the expression on her bare face when she winced. “You can decide for yourself if you want that when you’re older. For now, keep trying with force magic. You’re doing so well!”

Lucy huffed and turned back to her soap bubbles. The next one that drifted near Hawke’s head popped with a short-lived fire burst, at which Hawke only snorted and turned back to her and Varric’s conversation.

“I suppose it does sound like you need me,” Hawke murmured when she had heard the whole tale at last. “If nothing else to convince you and Cassandra to—what is that delightful phrase Isabela uses?—get all naked and sweaty together.”

Varric rolled his eyes but couldn’t honestly tell Hawke he was entirely opposed to it. “Fuck me, everyone in Thedas needs you.”

Hawke snorted. “Sure, but I don’t leave my life here for just anyone in Thedas. I suppose, for you though, I will start making a few arrangements.”

Then Hawke got that grin, the one like she was getting ready to tell you the most marvelous joke in the world. “Varric,” she said, “would you be a dear and take Lucy to Fenris for me? She’ll need someone to watch over her while we’re gone.”

Varric stared for a long time at the little girl, the one still giggling as she turned soap bubbles magnificent colors in the air. He rubbed a hand down his face, feeling the stubble he hadn’t seemed to be able to rid himself of since the destruction of Kirkwall rasp against his fingers. “Shit, Hawke,” he managed. “Are you sure that’s a good idea? You know, with the fire and the magic and the—“

“Lucy,” Hawke called across the bedroom. “Come say hello to your Uncle Varric. Let him look at you really close.”

The child scampered across the room, leaping over the wide bed and landing with a kind of easy grace that suggested it was not solely her muscles that propelled her through the air. Varric had never see anyone use magic quite like that before.

“Hello, Uncle Varric,” the small voice said. Varric looked down into a pair of bright, shockingly familiar, leaf-green eyes. He couldn’t help but let out a sharp gasp.

“Any more questions?” Hawke asked.

“I—I’ll just drop her off with Fenris and see you in Skyhold, then.”

“Good plan. We’ll meet you tomorrow after we’ve said our goodbyes.”

* * *

“Do you two remember when you were very little and I had a different job that took me away for a long time sometimes?”

Lucy and Grace, sitting in her lap, both nodded solemnly.

“Well, that job needs me back, and so I’m going to be gone for a few months. You—“ she turned to Lucy “—are going to live with your… with Fenris for a while. You’ll like him. He hunts slavers for fun.”

Lucy giggled. She had always wanted to go hunt slavers. “Will he teach me hunting magic?”

“Er, no. Well… probably not. He doesn’t really have magic, per se….”

“Like Grace?”

Lucy’s twin pulled a face at her. “As if I need magic, anyways. Too boring.”

Hawke sighed. “Yes, like Grace.”

“Where will I be going?” Grace asked.

“You’re going to visit my friend Anders.”

“Will I like him?” Despite Hawke having identical twins, ever since their birth she had always been able to distinguish Grace from her sister by dint of her furrowed brows and worried crinkles around her big green eyes.

“You’ll love him. He likes cats, and helping people when they’re sick.”

Grace nodded. “I like cats.”

Hawke held her technically-eldest daughter close. “You like helping people, too. It’s one of the things I love about you.”

“Yech,” Lucy interjected. “I like dogs.” A thoughtful pause. “and breaking stuff.”

Hawke snorted. Lucy and Fenris would do just fine.

“Do you two want to help me write letters explaining what’s happening?” Hawke asked.

They did, of course. They even agreed to Hawke’s strange request that they keep the fact they were twins a secret. It was, the three of them decided, simply more fun that way.

“Now, I have one more gift for you both before I go.” Hawke knelt and unwrapped pendants she had been keeping hidden in canvas cloth for months.

The pendants were identical, fashioned of rectangular shards of mirror wrapped in copper wire and strung on soft black leather. Grace gasped softly when she saw them, reaching out a single small finger to stroke along their beveled edges.

"My friend, your Aunt Merrill, made them for me. You can use them to talk to one another, no matter how far away you are."

Lucy grabbed at one and immediately started tormenting it with glowing bluish fingers.

Hawke briefly considered saying something like, "Careful, you're messing with ancient, possibly possessed, elven magic," but decided it really wouldn't help anything in the end. Besides, it wasn't as if she had behaved any differently when Merrill had first given _her_ the eluvian shard necklaces.

"Don't break them," she warned instead. "They're not terribly replaceable."

Both of Hawke's daughters nodded, hanging the pendants around their necks. Hawke regretfully turned her attention to helping them pack their things to go.

* * *

Anders was more than a little surprised to hear a polite knocking at the entrance to his small... well, cave, really, on the outskirts of Redcliffe. More surprised still to see Admiral Isabela, terror of the Waking Sea, was the one doing the knocking. And with a little girl, who was currently cloaked and hooded, in tow.

"Hello, handsome," she grinned. She was splattered with no small amount of blood, and the girl with her, perhaps seven, eight if she were on the short side, held onto what looked to be a staff designed for a battle mage twice her size.

"Er, hello." Anders' voice cracked a bit with disuse. "Can I... help you two? Not that it isn't lovely to see you, or, well, anyone really, but it's something of a surprise, especially when it doesn't look like either one of you need healing."

"Are you Anders?" The girl asked.

"...yes?" Anders had the unaccountable sensation that he was talking to a Templar. He turned to Isabela. “Is she yours?”

Isabela gave a throaty chuckle. "Not likely. I'm her delightful maiden aunt."

"Maiden in what sense, exactly?" Anders asked dryly.

"Mother says it means a woman who's focusing on her career," the child piped up.

"She would say something like that, cupcake. Though I suppose she isn't wrong." Isabela grinned like she had just set someone on fire. "Anyways, we're just stopping by to deliver a note. And a small present." She handed him an envelope. Anders glanced at it, uncomfortably familiar with the crest.

"Good to see you, handsome," Isabela said.

Anders had a response on his lips that died when he looked up from the envelope to find she had vanished, leaving behind her small charge and no further explanation.

The little girl threw back the hood to her cloak. Hawke. She looked exactly like Hawke.

"Er, pardon me," Anders mumbled, staring down at her, "but what is your mother's name, exactly?"

The child raised her eyebrows. "That's rude, don't you think? Asking mother's name before you know mine?"

There was something about the quirk of those eyebrows, too. Something sickeningly familiar about the emerald eyes under them, but Anders couldn't quite place it.

"...and after Aunt Isabela and I fought through all these Templars and abominations just to get here..." the lecture continued, but Anders' ears only caught the one word of it.

"Oh, Maker." He leaned heavily against the cave wall. She said _abomination_ just like Fenris. It had been three years since he heard that tone, but it was unmistakable, even in this place, even from a child's mouth. "Oh, Maker you're his."

"I'm sorry?"

"I-- What's your father's name?"

She scowled and folded her arms around the staff. Clearly Anders was not making a very good first impression. "I don't have a father," she said. " _my_ name is Grace Hawke."

"Oh, Maker." Anders said again. He slit open the envelope in his hands.

* * *

"Hawke. Good to see you again."

"Why if it isn't Knight-Captain Mages-Aren't-People!" Hawke cried, embracing Cullen. She draped herself like a cloak across one of his shoulders and swooned, letting her feet drag heavily along the dirt in Skyhold’s courtyard as he attempted to escape her.

"Are you ever going to let me live that down?"

"Have you ever properly apologized?"

"That was before I knew you were an apostate!"

"Oh, so it's okay to say in front of _people_ just not us second-class monstrosities."

Cullen sighed. "I've learned better now, and I apologize. Now will you please stop hanging off my neck?"

"I suppose." Hawke straightened up, if just slightly.

"It _is_ good to see you," Cullen mumbled, red-faced.

"It's nice to see you, too. Glad you survived the whole Kirkwall mess."

Cullen gave her a brief half-smile. It tugged at his lip scars. Hawke didn't recall him having those the last time they had spoken, and wondered if he had gained them in the fighting.

"So, what can I do for you?" She asked.

"We need information. Particularly anything you have on the Gray Wardens' disappearance."

Hawke nodded. "I have a friend in Crestwood," She thought of Alistair, his worrying letters. She trusted the poor man, for all that he was quite literally a Blighted Templar. "He's in a spot of trouble but if we can get through to him he may be a great deal of help."

"And please, talk to Adaar. I fear the stress is wearing on her."

"What about?"

Cullen shrugged. "The... position we've put her in. I do not regret the choice, she is an excellent leader, but..." he sighed and raked a hand through his hair. “If there is anyone who knows what it is like to suddenly become a hero, well….”

"Of course I’ll speak to her."

"I thank you. Do you require anything for your assistance?"

"I'd like some decent ale, that adorable dwarven scout, and an extremely sharp knife."

Cullen nodded, and Hawke grinned. After everything, it was still good to be back.

* * *

“What?” Barked Fenris.

"Easy, Broody. You have a guest."

"I don't really do much entertaining, dwarf."

"I didn't ask if you wanted this particular guest, Broody. Plus you're scaring her."

Fenris stomped out of his tent to glower at Varric, who was standing nonchalantly next to a child already almost equal to his height.

"I assume this is not yours," he gestured.

"You live in a tent?" the girl asked.

"Yes." Fenris thought he could hardly be blamed for being a little short with her. She was... well. He wasn't a fool. She flounced into his camp as though she owned the place and he had little chance to do more than shrug his acquiescence.

“That’s amazing! Mama won’t let me live in a tent. She says it’s not really all that it’s cracked up to be but it sounds nice and cool and you can hear the birds when you go to sleep and it’s not musty like a cottage…”

Varric pressed a bottle of Fenris’ preferred wine into his hands. "Here," he said. "I've had about a month's trip with her. Trust me, you'll need it."

Fenris took the wine and peeled the wax from its seal slowly. The child had a staff and was the spitting image of Hawke. It brought a pang he had long believed himself to be rid of to his heart.

"She is..."

"Hawke's kid, yeah."

"Who is the father? The abomination?"

It would make sense for a mage child so gregarious. The combination was written all over her features, the easy way she took over the area. Even the casual manner with which she slung aside her staff, not looking to see what damage it might have caused.

The dwarf let out a low chuckle. "Let's say I didn't get a precise answer to that."

"Fenris! Fenris! Look what I can do!" The child sent his fire from a comfortable crackle to a towering violet blast. Fenris felt his lyrium brands pulse in response to the sheer power under the little mage's command. "I just learnt that this morning!"

"Did you," he asked weakly.

"Did you like it?"

"No."

Varric elbowed him.

He cleared his throat and glowered at the dwarf. "It was... certainly exciting." he said at last.

"I'll get more wood." She scampered off towards a stand of scrubby trees not far from Fenris' campsite.

"Her name's Lucy Hawke," said Varric. "I doubt she'll settle down enough in the next few days to tell you herself."

Fenris nodded dumbly and used his pen knife to loosen the wine's cork.

* * *

“So….” Anders stared at the child across from him. “Are you any good with that staff?”

Grace shrugged. “I just now stole it. I like the blade on the end. It’s wider than most of them. And shiny.”

Ah yes. Hawke and Fenris’ daughter. Certainly she would love to stab things. He used to tease Hawke about it, he thought with a twist to his gut. Called her his barbarian. Anders swallowed against the memory and tried a different tack. “Well, do you have any interest in being a healer?”

Grace’s eyes lit up. “Yes!” It was the first show of real enthusiasm Anders had gotten from the child.

Anders grinned. The muscles pulled from lack of use in the recent weeks. “Great! What healing spells do you already know?”

“Spells?” Grace looked at him blankly. “I can’t do magic.”

“Oh,” Anders tried not to look as crestfallen as he felt. Judging by Grace’s annoyed expression, he failed miserably. “Well, you can still uh… make poultices and… there’s always alchemy and….” He trailed off into mumbling.

“I can do anything you can,” Grace snapped.

Well, thought Anders, that was just… patently untrue. But it wasn't as if he could say that to an eight-year-old.

Instead he swallowed around his diatribe and nodded. "I suppose that there are ways you could..."

" _Anything,_ " Grace repeated, glowering at him.

Anders didn't quite understand it, but for some reason he found himself believing her.

* * *

"Can I braid your hair?"

"What?" Fenris looked up from the map he had been surveying, alarmed.

"Can I braid your hair?" Lucy repeated.

"No." Fenris went back to his work. Surely, their camp wouldn't be far. If he could make it to their camp, take out their sentries before they crosses over into the area with all those slaver caves, he could—

"Please?"

"No!"

"It's too long for you," Lucy pouted. "If I braid it it'll stay out of your face while you kill slavers."

"While I—how do you know about that?"

"Mama said that's what you do for fun."

"It's not fun, it's—“

" _I_ think it sounds fun."

Fenris chuckled. "All right. Perhaps it is a little fun."

Lucy beamed at him. "It'd be even more fun if you would let me braid your hair."

"Fine," Fenris grumbled. "If braiding will silence you."

She settled herself with a hairbrush behind Fenris' back. “So that’s a no on adding flowers.”

“No flowers.” He didn’t want to know where the child would even manage to find flowers in the Hissing Wastes. The sensation of having another person there without being able to see them sent prickles down his spine, especially a mage. But this was Hawke's daughter. One little mage. How much harm could she do?

"Will you teach me to kill slavers?" Lucy asked abruptly.

Fenris almost laughed. "I don't think your mother would like it."

"My mother isn't here," Lucy pointed out. "And she said I should listen to you."

Fenris glanced at the ashen remains of his fire pit. The explosive force of Lucy's "trick" had left him blinking the afterimage away for several minutes, and likely would have incinerated him had he been standing closer. How much harm could one little mage do indeed.

"Tell me," he said, feeling the brush dig into snarls at the base of his scalp, "from how far away can you do _that_?"

* * *

“I’m not saying it’s a reasonable theory,” Hawke clarified, “I’m just saying that I refuse to give up on it altogether before testing it.”

“Let me get this straight,” The Iron Bull leaned over his tankard and half the bar table to boot, “you wanna fight Coryphaeus’s demon army by taming a battalion of dragons?”

“It’d be more like a mounted cavalry.”

Varric moaned into his ale. Even buying by the pitcher, he could afford a lot higher quality than the rat piss that tasted exactly like what they used to choke down at The Hanged Man, but quality wasn’t exactly the point of this venture. Hawke could afford better, too. Did buy better, in fact, for people who were not her. Evidence: Bull, grinning at Hawke over a full tankard of maraas-lok; Dorian, half smiling indulgently at Bull through his glass of Sun-Blonde Vint; Krem, scowling (though without any real heat) at Dorian with his mouth around a full bottle of the same.

“Varric,” Hawke nudged him under the table. He looked up at her, noting that their other table companions had somehow miraculously become absorbed with their own conversation. Well, Sparkler and Tiny were eye-fucking. So, same thing, really.

"Can I talk to you a moment?"

Varric could count on one hand—actually, possibly one of the Iron Bull's hands, missing fingers and all—the number of times that Hawke had spoken to him in that serious tone of voice. Usually, it meant that someone related to her was dead again. "Sure, anytime you need."

"Now is good."

Varric chuckled. "Now is always good for you. What's up?"

"Will you take this?" She held out a sealed letter. It looked... heavy. Heavier than Hawke's barely-a-page responses to the complete manuscript of Varric’s new novella that were more typical of their correspondence.

"Sure."

"You don't have to open it," she said. "Just... It's there. You know, for if I die."

"Sure."

"Are you going to say anything besides sure, Varric?" She was smiling.

"Sure." It sounded daft, but he had not realized until this moment that Hawke could die. Not when they were fighting seas of goddamned spiders, not when they were trapped in the deep roads, not even when the giant fucking slave statues came to scuttling life. It just hadn't occurred to him. She would always be Hawke, blood-soaked and glorious. Laughing as she fought Templars, injustice, even the fucking Arishok.

Shit.

"I just want there to be something for my girl, you know, if something happens at Adamant. It's just information, instructions, that kind of thing."

Varric nodded. "I'll take it. But I wouldn't worry. Nothing's gonna happen at Adamant."

Hawke sniggered. "You of all people should know better than to say that."

"Sure." Varric finished his ale.

"Hey, do you have a knife?"

"A what?"

"A knife. Cullen won't give me one since he found out what I’m using it for.”

Varric rolled his eyes. "He sure wasn't complaining about your blood magic when it saved his pretty ass in Kirkwall."

Hawke shrugged. “He can keep his scruples if it makes him happy.”

Varric handed over a dagger. Longer and more curved than Hawke's, but just as sharp. It carried a copy of his family crest—the old dwarven one that Hawke had found for him—worked into the handle. “What happened to your old one? That little short silver thing?”

Hawke shrugged with her tankard in her hand, sloshing shit ale over the counter. “Haven’t seen it since the fall of Kirkwall. Haven’t really been looking for it, you know? Blood magic and children and global responsibilities. They don’t mix terribly well, to be honest. I was glad to be rid of everything that made me….”

“Champion?” Varric suggested.

Hawke laughed. “Champion.”

"Do you know the words to Andraste's Mabari?" Lucy asked. She was staring up at the stars, having explained to Fenris that living in a tent was much more fun if one did not actually live _in_ the tent. It left Fenris with the thrilling prospect of either dragging his bedroll outside to camp with her unprotected from the freezing desert night or leaving her alone outside, presumably to be eaten up by wyverns.

Fenris wracked his memory. Was he supposed to? He knew about Mabaris, he knew about Andraste in the theoretical sense. Did she have a Mabari? Was there a verse about it in the Chant of Light? Surely that couldn't be historically accurate. Lucy began to hum, and somewhere in the chords, Fenris remembered the smell of stale beer, the clink of lost coinage.

"Is this that awful song your mother likes to sing when she gets drunk at taverns?"

Lucy shrugged. He couldn’t see the motion from his positon but he could hear the shifting in her bedroll. "I don’t know. She used to sing it to us—me when I was trying to fall asleep. I told her I was getting too big for it, and she said no one was ever too big for Mabaris. Now that I’m older I think she might be right."

Fenris thought of Hawke's aged dog, the white ringing his muzzle. He had died not long after Kirkwall's fall. Hawke had written him. She knew he liked dogs. He knew she loved the creature more than most people. He had thought, until Varric arrived with Lucy, that the Mabari had been all the family Hawke had left.

"We used to have a Mabari," Lucy told him. "When we were very young."

Fenris repressed the urge to ask her how young exactly she thought she was now. Varric had told him to be... accepting of the child. He hoped that wherever he was, the dwarf was impressed. "Garrett," he said instead.

"Did you know him?" Lucy sat up on an elbow. "Mama said that he was already old and retired by the time we were born, but he was still fierce enough to protect us."

Fenris nodded. "I used to bring him cheese."

"He liked cheese," Lucy confirmed. "Especially curds. If he ate too much at once it made his burps squeak."

Fenris chuckled at that. It had been a long time since he had fed the creature, but he still remembered that strange little noise. It had been one of the few bright points in his and Hawke's long, frustrating reading lessons. Well. One of the few bright points besides Hawke herself.

"Did you know that they used to belong to the Tevinter Imperium?" Lucy asked.

"Did I what?" Fenris turned in his bedroll to look at her.

Lucy, at it happened, was already propped on an elbow and staring at him with wide green eyes. "Mabaris. Mama said they were Tevinter dogs first, but that they switched over to Ferelden during the big Andraste war. Mama said it's because they liked us better than the smelly old Magisters."

"I think they had good taste," said Fenris slowly.

"That's what Mama said, too."

I know, he wanted to tell her. I know because I said it first. I just didn't think she would remember. Instead, he told her, "I've met a magister, you know."

"Was he smelly?"

Fenris had never believed he could smile while thinking about Denarius. "Among other things, yes."

Lucy giggled as she drifted off to sleep.

* * *

Grace swept into the cave without so much as a knock. Anders thought to be upset for a moment, but the fact was that she was also living here. And, well, it was a bit hard to knock when he didn't have a door.

She had a cat. Or, at least, the bundle of matted fur and bones she had picked up was mewling like a cat. The thing looked riddled with disease and had a line of nasty red gashes down its left side. Grace cradled it as though it were precious.

"Cure her," she demanded, thrusting her burden in Anders' direction.

He shook his head. "I can't."

"You're a healer," Grace argued. "I've seen you heal all sorts of people."

"Yes. _people,_ ” Anders specified. “Not animals."

Grace scowled at him, a fearsome expression even for her small face. Yes, the more he knew her the more certain Anders was that this girl belonged—in some ineffable way—to Fenris.

"I can't," he repeated. "Spirit healing doesn't work like that. I wish it did."

Grace huffed and said something that sounded alarmingly like _mages_ under her breath. Then she unrolled her travel cloak and let the nasty creature lay out on it on the cave floor, flies and all.

She gazed speculatively at the thing, which mewled once more.  
"I need elfroot."

Anders tried one last time. "It's going to die, Grace. I wish we could save it, I really do. But look at it; it's lost so much blood and the infection alone—“

Grace folded those narrow little arms of hers. "Did I ask your opinion, or did I ask for elfroot?"

"When this is over," sighed Anders, "we are going to work on your bedside manner." But he fetched her some of the dried elfroot from where it hung on their stone ceiling nonetheless.

Grace did not so much thank him as offer an appreciative grunt. She fetched a bowl, a needle and thread, and a bucket of water. "If you can't heal her, then at least heat this." She thrust the bucket at him.

Anders had had many assistants back in Darktown. A number of them had even been without healing magic. But he had never had one so pushy before.

As if sensing his thoughts, Grace added a "please," in softer tones. "Please, I want her to live."

Anders nodded and brought the water to a brisk boil. Grace prepared a needle and fine, undyed thread. Now that he thought about it, he had likely been this pushy with his own assistants on more than one occasion.

"Please get me some embrium as well."

Anders handed it to her, well past questioning. At worst, he figured, they would have to go out and pick herbs again soon. There were worse ways for a child to learn she couldn't save everyone.

"And deathroot."

"Deathroot?" Anders all but yelped.

"Deathroot," she confirmed. "It'll get rid of the infection."

It'll give that cat a merciful death, he thought. But he pulled a small, wax-sealed pot out of his pack nonetheless. "If you’re sure about this."

"I am."

She poured a tiny bit of steaming water into the bowl, just barely enough to wet the dried elfroot and embrium. She pulled out a small knife from maker knew where—Anders certainly hadn’t given one so obviously sharp to a child—and cut a tiny nub off of the deathroot in his jar, throwing it in with the less lethal herbs.

“I just—“ He tried to stop himself, he really did. “It _is_ called deathroot for a reason, you know.”

Grace seemed well past giving a damn what Anders thought and began mashing all of the herbs into something he could not rightly call a poultice. She added a few powders from somewhere in her pack that Anders could not identify without closer inspection as she went. The concoction reminded him of the days (every day) that they would serve boiled cabbage in Ferelden’s circle, actually. The sweaty foot smell, at least, was roughly the same. She set the muck aside and began to dab at the cat’s wounds with a clean rag and the remaining hot water. The cat gave an irritated sort of “mrrow” but otherwise let her work.

In moments, Grace had the cat’s wounds cleaned and salved. She talked to the cat while she worked. Talked possibly more than Anders had heard her speak in days, telling the hideous thing what a pretty creature it was. How lovely, how clever, escaping like it did from that falcon. How good of it to be so still while she helped it. Anders was transfixed. He had never seen a cat listen to anyone. He had also never seen a healer who wasn’t a mage.

The cat, evidently feeling better already, whipped out a paw and attempted to maul Grace’s hand, yowling as the girl started a neat row of stitches. Grace grimaced, and Anders could see the muscles in her small oval face clench, but she finished the stitch. The cat tried again when Grace moved to the next cut, the pain apparently fresh. Blood pearled where the cat struck and Grace, seemingly unconsciously, wiped the back of her hand in a long smear across her nose before continuing. Anders almost laughed aloud. Grace Hawke. Of course she would.

Grace finished the stitches even as she continued to bleed, only stopping to clean off her hand when her blood made the needle slippery. She tied off the last of the thread and gave the cat a smaller, frankly more adorable version of her father’s trademark glower. “I was trying to help you, you know.” She began packing up her supplies and putting them away neatly.

“Can you not—“ Anders was still staring at her hand. It wasn’t the same, he knew that, and it had been a long time since he had been subjected, nut the sight of a bleeding hand still—it did things to him. “May I heal that cut?” he tried instead.

Grace glanced down at her hand. It was scarcely more than a scratch, Anders knew. He prepared himself for yet another installment of Grace Hawke’s lecture series on Overuse of Magic and the Wasting of Mana but it never came. Instead, she looked at him with those perceptive green eyes, they eyes that were just like Fenris’, and said, “It disturbs you. Why?”

Anders swallowed. How was he to explain to this—this child, who wasn’t even a mage, who had grown up with Marian Hawke of all people, what it was like not to have freedom? Why he had done everything he’d done? _Start small,_ Hawke had told him every time this happened back in Kirkwall, when he had wanted to rave about Justice and abuse and tranquility and death. _start small and tell them your story._ The feel of a lancet, then. The soft droplets of blood into a phial. The brief sizzle and pull of tracking magic. An open window; a swim. A year spent listening for footsteps in the silent dark.

 _They’ll only understand if you let them see you._ He hadn’t listened to her back then. The hurts he was trying to address had been too big. Some wounds were like that; they’d suck you in and drain you dry and still you couldn’t even begin to heal them. But here Hawke was, or part of her. Staring up at him through Fenris’ eyes. Fenris, who hated magic, who thought that the whole thing had been Anders’ fault, but had defended the circle from tyranny to the last breath. Now there was someone else he wished he could find and start over with.

Anders sighed and knelt down next to Grace, who was still looking at him, waiting for an answer. “Do you know what a phylactery is?”

* * *

Hawke chuckled blackly at the nightmare demon, feeling the insistent burble of blood at the back of her throat. A punctured lung from that cracked rib, no doubt.

“Your children will die,” it rasped, “and nothing you can do will stop it.”

“That so?” Hawke asked. She put as much energy as she knew how into a fireball. No point in a barrier now. Beyond the many legs, she could just make out the inquisitor and Alistair plunging safely into the rift.

“I will see to it myself,” the creature snarled.

“Ooh. You might have a slight problem with that.” Slowly, Hawke pulled the brand new knife Varric had given her out of her belt loop. “Haven’t you heard? All these crazy mages are out binding demons to their will with blood magic.”

With that, Hawke brought the knife up and jerked out, slitting her own throat. Her mouth shaped around incantations in silence and she fell to her knees, ears ringing with the sound of the Nightmare’s last howl.

* * *

“Teach me to fight,” Grace demanded.

“Teach you to—what? No!”

Grace folded her arms and glared at him. “Why not?”

 _Because you should never have to,_ Anders thought. “Because, even if you were old enough, which you are most certainly not, I’m not who should train you. I only know how to fight with magic.” Anders abruptly found himself missing Fenris. He seemed to be doing that more and more these days.

“I can do anything you can,” Grace told him once again.

“You can’t,” Anders snapped, temper getting the better of him at last. “You just can’t! You’re not a mage! It isn’t that simple!”

Grace gave him such a mulish glower that Anders briefly thought he had just woken up in Kirkwall, Hawke glowering at him to get dressed already because there were slavers to kill and the past five years nothing but a freakish dream. Hawke’s daughter bit out two words:  
“Watch me.”

“Fine!” Anders grabbed his staff and went through a complex twirling motion, slamming it crystal first into the ground and sending a fireball hurtling to earth just outside the cave entrance. “If you can do _that,_ I’ll teach you.”

The cat, now long since healed, christened Lady Hissington, and bearing a row of ugly white scars up her side rubbed against Anders’ leg in an attempt to soothe him.

Grace simply grabbed her pack, a handful of glass phials, and the old battlemage staff she had stolen and stalked out. Anders collapsed backwards onto his cot and let out a slow breath. Lady Hissington glared at him reproachfully and hopped into his lap, nudging his hands into a better position for her ears to be scritched.

“I know I shouldn’t have done that,” he sighed, uncertain if he were speaking to himself, Justice, or the cat. “I’ll go after her as soon as I catch my breath.”

By the time Anders grabbed his staff and put his boots on, however, Grace was long gone and—thanks to her blasted Fereldan mother, no doubt—nigh untraceable in the forest.

Anders moped and fretted for the better part of the day, his mind on Templars and apostates and bears, until Grace returned just a scant half hour before sundown.

“I was so worried about—“ Grace held up a finger to silence him. Very slowly, she placed her pack on the ground, then hefted the staff in her hands. She executed a brief twirl, flourishless but unmistakably the movement for a fireball. Anders held his breath, as if she might suddenly manifest her magic. Instead, Grace reached into her pocket, pulled out a flask and hefted it at a nearby patch of grass.

There was a brief tinkle of shattered glass followed almost instantly by a whoosh of heat and alchemical flame. Anders shielded his eyes and, when the searing heat had cleared, he lowered his hand to blink at the smoldering crater, the earth at its center melted smooth as glass.  
“Andraste’s silky underthings,” he whispered.

“Teach me to fight,” Grace said again. “You promised.”

“Well, yes,” mumbled Anders, “I rather suppose I did.”

* * *

Varric put his quill to paper, only to find that the ink had long since dried on the tip. He replaced it in the inkwell and took a sip of the expensive Antivan brandy he had purchased, staring into the fire.

He tried again.

 _Broody,_  
He stopped, frowning at the page. It had sounded more… friendly in his head. Comforting. On paper it just seemed mocking. He tossed the letter into the fire, took a drink, and tried again.  
_Fenris,_  
_I’m sorry to tell you, but Hawke is_

He stopped. In the story he was telling himself, the one he would relate later to others when asked, because that is what he did, tell stories and make things make sense, he would say that he stopped writing because he heard someone approaching his writing table by the fire.

“Varric, I—“ Adaar bit her lip before she managed to compose herself. “I know it solves nothing, but I am so sorry.”

Varric shrugged, feeling his lips give a ghastly contortion of muscles shaped something like a smile. “It’s not your fault. It’s mine, as much as it is anyone’s.”

He said it like they were talking about a spilled drink. Like the whole issue could be smoothed over, what was once lost replaced with a smile and a fistful of copper. It was possible, Varric mused, that he had never learned how to deal with losing someone. The irony of that thought alone was enough to floor him.

“Did she… leave you anything?” Adaar’s eyes were gentle and sad.

Varric felt the weight of the letter in his breast pocket. It was still unopened. _It’s there, you know, for if I die._

Was it such a crime, he wondered, to wait until they were sure? Once it was cracked, the wax seal could never be closed quite the same again. He knew that for certain-- he was from the merchant’s guild; he was quite fastidious about reassembling perfect seals on opened letters. Varric felt the weight of the envelope on his chest. It was thick, comforting. A possibility. "No," he said. “She didn’t leave me anything.”

"That's too bad," answered Adaar. "Well, we have some of her personal effects still. From her room here. I was thinking you're the best suited to..." she trailed off. “If you’re not up to… Well. I’m sorry.”

Varric nodded. "I'll get on it soon. For right now I have some letters to write.”

* * *

"Fenris?" Lucy looked concerned. "Fenris what's wrong?"

Fenris looked up from the crumpled letter in his hands. "I'm afraid...” he began. “I'm afraid I cannot read this."

Lucy frowned. "You mean you don’t know how to read?" The notion seemed unthinkable to her, despite the fact that Fenris had never seen the child sit still long enough to crack open a book, let alone finish one. Hawke’s daughter _would_ feel that way, he supposed.

"I mean that I learned to do so late in life and... and this must be wrong. I cannot have read it right."

Lucy eased the letter from his tense fingers, brushing against the swirls of lyrium that marked him even there. Fenris did everything he could not to flinch, not to fear the raw power that oozed from her very flesh, just as her mother's had. Her mother, who... whom he had left. Had left alone to face terrors beyond imagining. And now....

He cannot have read that letter correctly.

"Fenris," Lucy began in her most official-sounding letter voice. "I'm sorry to have to tell you like this, but Hawke is..."

Lucy trailed off, the paper gently sagging, weighed down by a rime of frost blossoming from her hands. "I—I can't—"

Fenris swallowed, his every instinct screaming at him to run, to get out, to at the very least go for a walk and clear his head. Instead, he raised his arms awkwardly. Lucy buried herself against his chest and began to cry. She was so young. Only a few years old, really. He could not have read the letter right.

* * *

Anders smoothed the letter out on the small apothecary table Grace had “borrowed” (commandeered) from some of the apostates. It had been... nice, he had to admit, to have a table again.

A mage light hung above him. Grace always scoffed when he did things like that, saying he could accomplish them just as easily without magic and without wasting mana. But here he was. Wasting.

Grace was outside, speaking to a Ser Lysette of the Inquisition. She seemed…decent. As Templars went. At least, he trusted her near Grace. Provided that he could still see both of them and Grace had a weapon. She was gesticulating as much as she ever did (only simply, and with the briskest efficiency), showing Lysette a book. Anatomy, probably, though Grace had recently taken to reading his own little patchwork Grimoire as well. What she might gain from the spells in it, he didn’t know. She looked… happy. Content, at the least. She was composing an herb manual, talking to passers-by about scientific medicine. He didn’t want to tell her. He found that he didn’t want to tell Grace a lot of things.

Anders began cutting up turnips for their dinner. Grace had already arranged the cleaned ingredients in neat stacks. There would be turnip stew, and a last pleasant conversation before nightfall. Surely he could give her that.

* * *

Lucy sat halfway out of bed with an aborted cry.

Fenris was awake instantly, though it took him a moment to set down his sword. "Are you all right, H—Lucy?" he asked.

"I—" Lucy's voice was wet with tears. "I'm okay. Just a bad dream, that's all."

Fenris crawled out of his bed roll and slowly situated himself on the end of the girl's. "Is there... something I can do?" his brands illuminated her face in the otherwise black desert night.

She shook her head. "I'll be all right. Not a big deal. Happens a lot. Especially since--" she trailed off.

Fenris felt an unfamiliar bubble of panic in his abdomen. Had she been having nightmares since the news Hawke was lost? Since she came to live with him? Since the breach? When?

Had he been ignoring her cries? Or mistaking them for something else?  
He swallowed back a suddenly bilious throat. "Do you have these nightmares often?"

Lucy hunched over onto herself so that Fenris could not read her face even in the light of the lyrium markings. "Sorry for waking you up," she said softly, "I'm usually quieter."

"You're usually—" Fenris made a horrified noise that choked off somewhere within his throat. "Is that your greatest concern, then? Interrupting my sleep?" Was he really the sort of man children feared to wake up when they had nightmares? The abomination had said as much to him once, though not in so many words. Perhaps if Anders were here now, he would know how to soothe a mage-child’s terrible dreams. Fenris was certainly at a loss.

Lucy tilted her head up, eyeing him carefully, but kept her mouth firmly shut.

Fenris sighed. "Tell me about these dreams?"

That earned him a vigorous shake of the head.

"Could you perhaps be persuaded to tell me how your mother used to comfort you?"

"You'll think it's silly," Lucy mumbled.

"Perhaps," said Fenris. He saw no gain in lying to the girl. "But I think many things are silly. The braiding of hair, for instance. That does not mean they are not worth participating in."

He could have sworn he saw a small smile, still damp from Lucy's tears. Though he supposed it could also have been a trick of the light.

"When we're—when I'm sad," Lucy began, "Mama used to sing 'Andraste's Mabari.' She said the mabari could follow us into the Fade and chase the nightmares away."

"Of course she did," Fenris said. Lucy looked nervous, and so he elaborated carefully. "Mabari are very loyal creatures. Especially to the Fereldans. I am told they will follow their masters to death and back."

"Mama says I'm Fereldan."

"And so you are," said Fenris. "You're certainly obstinate enough."

Lucy giggled, and Fenris scooted himself closer, until the small mage girl was nestled under one of his arms. Then he stroked her shaggy black hair, startled to find that it felt silky, more like his own hair than Hawke's, and he began to sing, voice rough and stumbling over the half-remembered tune:

 

> _You know Andraste's old mabari._  
>  He don't show up in the chant.  
>  And if you ask those holy sisters,  
>  Well, they'll say Andraste can't  
>  Have had some big old smelly war dog.  
>  But all Ferelden knows it right:  
>  Our sweet Lady needed someone  
>  Who would warm her feet at night.

He sang the whole song, verse after verse. He wasn’t sure of the exact order, or which verses Hawke had made up herself (he had a sneaking suspicion that the dog was supposed to die at the end) but he sang the whole song, or as much as he knew, nonetheless. When he finished, he sang it again, his fingers still carding through Lucy’s hair.

They stayed like that, voices low and out of all time and key, until Lucy was sound asleep and Fenris’ head began to droop. The morning found Fenris curled around her protectively, blankets tangled under the baking sun.

* * *

When the nightmares did not abate, Fenris began wracking his brains for what had helped him learn to sleep when he first earned his freedom.

The only thing his eyes fell upon was his sword. A weapon, something that proved he was not and would never again be a slave.

Lucy didn't dream of slavery or Tevinter. Instead, she had a mage's dreams, plagued by demons and a lost mother. Fenris could not get Hawke back, would already have done so if he could, but he did know how to kill demons.

Lucy did not use a sword, though. She used magic. Fenris did not know how one went about training a mage, but he did remember a story from Tevinter. The archon who had fought with a blade unlike any other.

For some reason, he found that the thought of Lucy Hawke as Archon did not disturb him in the slightest. In fact he smiled, thinking of her on the throne. Perhaps interrupting a blood ritual to insist on showing an especially exciting flower to the entire Magisterium. Imperium politics would be simply _fascinating_ forever after.

And in the meantime, he found her a blade of Tridarion.

* * *

For the first time in over a month, Lucy crept over to the stream near her and Fenris's camp, clutching the shard of mirror that hung about her neck.

It did not take magic to work, exactly. How it worked was a bit beyond her in general. But she held it in her hands nonetheless and wished for her sister.

Grace Hawke's face appeared in the mirror, her voice low and rough. "Did you hear?" she asked without preamble.

"Hello," said Lucy. "I heard yesterday, but I couldn't talk to you. Fenris has been worried."

Grace nodded, her face dark and shadowed in the mirror. "I found out two weeks ago. I think it takes them longer to send letters into the desert."

"What are we gonna do, Grace?"

“What do you mean?”

"Mama said we shouldn't tell Anders and Fenris there were two of us. We promised!"

"I hardly think she was expecting to get trapped in the Fade when she told us that," Grace pointed out.

"We promised," Lucy insisted, and began to cry once more.

Grace made small, soothing noises into her mirror until her twin was focused again.

"Okay, Lucy. We won't tell them. You're right. We promised."

Lucy sniffled, but gave Grace a weak smile. "But what are we gonna do, then? I don't wanna grow up without you."

"Nor I you," Grace murmured.

"So what are we gonna do?"

Lucy's sister gave her a dangerous smile. "I will tell you what we're going to do. Mother is lost in the Fade, isn’t she?”

Lucy nodded.

“Then it’s simple. We're going to bring her back."

* * *

“I came to drink on your tab,” Isabela bellowed into Varric’s quarters. “If you want my company as well you had better get moving.”

Varric heaved himself out of bed. Hawke had once told him that the best hangover cure was more wine. They would certainly see about that.

Cabot had seen enough of Varric since Hawke disappeared to stop even suggesting that he try doing something healthier. He simply poured Varric a small glass of Antivan Sip-Sip and left the bottle. Isabela knocked it back as though it were just water, then poured again.

Varric eased himself into a chair and began working on the second glass. Isabela, undaunted by things like private ownership and possible death, simply began necking the bottle.

“So is the kid just going to stay where she is, then?” Isabela asked when both of them were at last drunk enough to talk about such things.

Varric shrugged. “It’s not like either of us is exactly fit to raise her.”

“True. Still, I’m not sure that ‘raised by a glowing blue murder man out in the wilderness’ was exactly what Hawke wanted for her daughter’s childhood.”

Varric shrugged. “Better Broody in the desert than me in a ruined castle. I’m not saying it’s ideal, but—“

“Hang on a tick,” Said Isabela, staring at the bottle. “Did I drink more of this than I thought or did you just say she was with Fenris?”

“Of course she’s with Fenris, I dropped her off myself nine months ago!”

Isabela stared at him. “See, that’s quite fascinating to me, Varric, because I dropped Hawke’s daughter off with Anders eight months back.”

Varric blew out a slow breath and then pulled a letter from his pocket. He took another swallow of whiskey, cracked the seal on the envelope, and began to read.

 _Dear Varric,_  
_I have some news that may come as a bit of a surprise, but seeing as if you’re reading this I’m likely dead now, you can’t exactly hold it against me…._

“Oh shit,” Varric breathed.

Isabela leaned over his shoulder, scanning Hawke’s cramped hand on the page. “Oh shit, indeed.”

* * *

Val fucking Royeaux, seat of the Chantry, home of the largest circle in Orlais and its accompanying “loyalist mages.” Nowhere Anders would rather be. “All right, so we’re going to get a room at the cheapest possible inn, not speak to anyone, and then we’re going to sleep, pack, and then leave. Also without talking to anyone.”

“Sure.” Grace seemed distracted. Anticipatory, even. And she had complained—actually complained—of her exhaustion far earlier than Anders had expected. Anders might have given her state more thought had he not been an anxious wreck himself. As it was, he simply flung himself fully clothed onto the large bed he and Grace had been provided and fell into a fitful, anxious sleep, despite the fact that it was scarcely past sundown.

He awoke not five hours later to find that, despite having gone to sleep with his charge next to him, Grace, and her staff, were nowhere to be found.

* * *

Masks everywhere, people drinking themselves fat and sick on their wealth and foolishness. Who could possibly enjoy Val Royeaux? Fenris thought bitterly, sidestepping a puddle of sick someone had left in an alley. They could have stopped hours ago somewhere outside the city, but Lucy had insisted that they reach Val Royeaux before they retired. Fenris had fretted for hours, the girl was clearly exhausted, but it wasn’t as if he had all that much say in the matter of Lucy Hawke’s personal activities.

“Look at all the colors, Fenris! Aren’t they beautiful?” Lucy was the answer to his questions, apparently. Lucy could enjoy Val Royeaux. While carrying a staff openly. While perhaps getting excited enough to lose control of her magic. Fenris shuddered. He had not been concerned about a mage being taken to a Circle since… well. Not for a while.

Now he was not so sure he would not kill every last Templar in Mortisimmard to keep Lucy free. Fenris chuckled under his breath. What would Anders say to that?

“See? It can be fun. Look at all the fabrics!” Fenris did look where Lucy pointed, and for a second he was able to see the elaborate gowns, the rich drapings, simply as beautiful things without fretting about who made them and how they were cleaned.

Apparently, he did an insufficient job conveying his appreciation for this, as Lucy patted his arm sympathetically and told him, “Well, if you don’t like the colors at least think about all the fun ways we could murder them.”

 _That_ got a real laugh out of Fenris. “You are alarmingly bloodthirsty, little mage.” he told his charge. She just laughed, and wiggled fingers that crackled with lightning.

It had been early midnight when they arrived in the city, and it was even later when they found a reasonably cheap inn. Their room had a pair of twin beds, but Lucy insisted on pushing them together so that they would not be separated in case she had another nightmare.

The last thing Fenris remembered was singing and stroking Lucy’s hair until one or both of them fell asleep.

He awoke not long after with a start, staring frantically at an empty room.

* * *

“And just where in the void do you think you’re going?” Anders snapped at the small, dark-haired figure carrying her staff down the alley.

Grace yelped and Anders suddenly found himself with a face full of fireball. Without a thought, he slammed his concentration into a barrier. The fireball mirrored back on its caster, who leapt out of the way. Anders was then faced with one hundred pounds of angry girl mage, carrying a short staff like it was a broadsword made of lightning. She hacked and fade-stepped past his defenses in equal measure, not resting until he felt the still-familiar sensation of a not quite incorporeal hand clenched around his heart.

“Andraste’s lacy garter belt, Grace, couldn’t you have just _told_ me you came into your magic?”

A static pulse went through Anders’ body at the name. It felt unintentional. Grace Hawke was no mage. Grace Hawke was also nothing if not intentional.

“…You’re not Grace.” She looked like Grace. Green eyes, shaggy dark hair, pointed face all twisted with fury.

“Well you’re sure not about to find out who I am by following a helpless little girl into a dark alley,” she snapped. Her voice was lower than Grace’s. Her accent less Fereldan, more… well, Tevene-sounding, actually, but that couldn’t possibly be right.

“You have _your_ hand in _my_ chest cavity,” Anders pointed out. Fenris had threatened him this way enough when they were in Kirkwall. It had been years since he felt that horrible sliding feeling against his organs but still he knew how to force his body to remain calm.

“You followed me here.”

Anders frowned. The child had a point. “I thought you were my—“ he paused there. “I thought you were someone else. Apologies.”

“Are you Anders?” The girl asked.

“Ye-es?” Anders answered nervously.

“Oh. Sorry.” She hastily removed her hand from Anders’ ribcage. A little too hastily. It pinched. “Do you know the way back to the inn? I’m a little lost. I’m Lucy, by the way.”

“I—Okay.” Anders took her hand and began to walk towards the inn, not even stopping to ask which one she meant out of the hundreds in Val Royeaux.

* * *

By the time Fenris found Lucy he was gasping. He had run through dozens of side streets and twisting alleyways, even asked a passerby if they had seen her. (Said passerby had helpfully informed Fenris that he was a knife-ear and should not be speaking to someone so distinguished if he had not yet been spoken to.)

“You magic me to sleep and then run off in the middle of a strange city?” Fenris shouted.

“I did no such thing!” Lucy yelled back. She always sounded more like her Fereldan mother when she was upset.

Fenris advanced on her. She lobbed something at him that Fenris put up a hand to deflect. He didn’t register anything wrong until he heard the tinkling of shattered glass and found his feet glued to the cobblestones as effectively as any mage’s glyph of paralysis.

The girl, who looked exactly like Lucy, leveled the blade end of a battlemage staff at Fenris’ throat. “Oh Maker,” Fenris breathed, coming to a number of terrifying realizations all at the exact same time. “There are two of you.”

“You’re Fenris?” The girl asked. She had his eyes, some part of Fenris’ brain babbled. This girl, whoever she was, and Lucy Hawke _both_ had his exact green eyes. A shade or two darker, perhaps, but otherwise undeniably the same. He had no notion of how he could have not noticed before.

“I am,” he told her. And quite suddenly, despite being paralyzed and facing the wrong end of a mage’s staff, he found he was no longer afraid.

* * *

“She’s never going to have magic, you know.”

“What?” Anders was barely out of his catatonia well enough to respond in one word answers, let alone think over Lucy’s words.

“Grace. She’s never going to have magic. You can’t keep pushing it on her.”

“I wasn’t—“

“You’re still expecting her to wake up one day with magic powers and it’s stupid. It’s never going to happen.”

“You don’t know that,” Anders wasn’t really sure how this girl knew anything, but he could accept that she did. “I didn’t get any magic until I was twelve years old. You still have time.”

“It’s not about time, Anders,” Lucy sounded as though she were explaining the concept of ‘sit’ to an especially dimwitted mabari. “People like us, we’re mages because we’re afraid. We were afraid and angry once and we needed a way to make all the scary things stop. Grace isn’t like that.”

There were a million things Anders could have said to that, starting with bloodlines and statistical likelihoods of bearing a child with mage blood and ending with Tevinter legends of the first dreamers. Instead of any of those things, though, he said, “Grace can be afraid sometimes.”

Lucy shrugged. “Grace doesn’t ask for help when something scares her. She looks for a solution.”

“What about when you’re scared?” Anders asked, thinking of being twelve years old and terrified, of the smell of a burning barn.

“I look for Grace.”

* * *

Fenris stared at the girl seated on the inn bed. He was backed against the grubby wall of a room not two doors down from his own, clutching a bottle of vaguely-Tevinter might-be-red. Frequent swallows from it did not make his situation less confusing. Grace, it seemed, was content to wait.

“Lucy will be back,” she said after a while. “We were supposed to meet up, but we both got lost. I told her we should come back here if there were any problems.”

“How do you—“

“Grace?” Lucy’s voice, and it was unmistakably Lucy’s voice this time, no higher pitch or slight difference in accent, came through the mirrored pendant that hung about Grace’s neck, under her shirt. Fenris had seen the girl glance at it once earlier. He was not stupid, had seen an identical pendant on Lucy, but had assumed that the remembrance—a gift from Hawke before she…well.—was more decorative than functional.

“I found Fenris,” said Grace. “He’s quite cross. I warned you not to magic him.”

“Great! We’ll be there soon. And, uh, tell Fenris I’m sorry, would you?”

“He can hear, you, Lucy.” Grace’s voice held a note of wry exasperation Fenris vaguely recalled from his time spent in Anders’ clinic in Kirkwall. Surely though, that was just coincidence. Surely—

“Fenris!” The door opened with a sound like a gaatlok cannon and Fenris found himself with both arms full of prepubescent mage, talking seemingly without drawing breath. “I’m sorry that I magicked you to sleep and then ran off in the middle of the night I know you don’t like it when I mage at you and also I probably shouldn’t have snuck out in a strange city but it was _important_ and it’s your own fault really you sleep way too lightly for me to get away with anything remember last week when you thought you heard a noise in the bushes and—“

“Hush,” Fenris cut her off when Lucy paused for air. “I am relieved that you are safe. That is enough.” He gingerly placed his bottle on the floor to keep it from being knocked over and then wrapped both arms around his—well. He pressed his lips gently to Lucy’s hair, sliding them both to the floor in a tangle of willowy limbs. Lucy smiled at him—she really did have his eyes—and then jumped up to seize Grace with approximately the same force Fenris had just been subjected to.

Grace, contrary to the expectations of absolutely everyone in the room, wrapped her arms around her sister and began to cry. Fenris was so shocked by the display it took him several long moments to note the figure standing silent in the doorway.

Anders’ hair was longer than Fenris remembered it, though that could have been because he was now wearing it loose about his face instead of in those messy buns. He looked older, in some way that wasn’t quite about years passing. Better-fed, too. His robes, which Fenris was not at all certain weren’t still some of the ones Hawke had bought for Anders when they all lived in Kirkwall, were heavily mended, but clean.

He looked… good, Fenris thought. Healthier than he’d ever seen him.

Anders gave him a wry sort of cracking smile and sauntered over. “Should have known Hawke would never entrust her only daughter to me.”

“She was not a complete fool,” Fenris agreed. Then, because he was sharp at the edges, and Lucy was teaching him not to be, he blunted the remark: “She did not give me her only daughter either.”

Anders chuckled a little. Fenris could not recall if he had ever heard the sound before. “You’re nicer than I remember.”

“You are less skeletal than I remember. Perhaps we have both changed.” Anders slid down the wall to sit next to Fenris, both of them watching their girls get reacquainted.

“It’s the braids,” he said at last. “The braids are holding back all the nastiness.”

Fenris shrugged. “Then I suppose you have Lucy to thank for that. She enjoys taking…artistic liberties with my personal appearance.”

Anders snorted. “And here I thought that a do-it-yourself attitude towards learning alchemy was the worst thing one of Hawke’s children could get up to.”

“It’s an effective education, I’ll give you that.” The bottoms of Fenris’ feet were still slightly tacky from whatever Grace had thrown on them.

Anders looked at Grace with something like adoration in his eyes. “She deserves all the credit. She really does.”

“Did Hawke ever tell you about—“ Fenris jerked his chin towards Lucy and Grace.

Anders shook his head. “Never. I didn’t even know she had one daughter until Isabela brought her to me, let alone two. What about you? I was sure if Hawke was going to tell anyone it would be—“

“No.” Fenris bit his lip. “Marian and I—after I—well. For a long while we did not talk much. It is… something I deeply regret.”

“I have regrets as well,” said Anders softly. Fenris was not sure when it had happened, which of them had moved, but his left hand had gone from being pressed against the dusty inn floor to being just barely cradled by one of Anders’.

Both men seemed to realize this at the exact same time, glancing nervously to where their fingers laid loosely tangled but not quite ready to remove them. Lucy cleared her throat.

“We were hoping,” Lucy began, “that we could travel to Skyhold together. You know, to find Mama.”

“I am not opposed to it,” Anders began, “but I don’t see how that will help. We can hardly break open the Fade, and even if we could how would we find her?” _If she’s even still alive_ went unsaid, but perhaps not unheard in the ensuing silence.

“I have a solution for that.” Grace’s voice was soft but not remotely uncertain.

“I told you,” Lucy hissed at Anders. Fenris raised an eyebrow at the girl. Presumably he had missed some sort of context.

“Your solution?” Fenris prompted.

“Anders told me once about a way to track mages when they got lost. A…?”

“Phylactery,” Anders supplied. “But we don’t have Hawke’s blood. And that’s if Hawke even has a body to—“ Fenris elbowed him sharply.

“That depends,” Grace told him. “How long after it’s out of someone’s body can you still use the blood?”

“I don’t see how that’s—“

Grace held up a finger and rummaged through her pack. She came out with a white handkerchief wrapped around a short silver knife. Clearly the thing had gone years without being touched but spattered all along its edges, in its fuller and the handle grooves, was, quite unmistakably, dried blood. And Fenris knew that knife. Had long feared that knife even if only in his most private daydreams. He knew whose blood that was.

“We can work with it,” Lucy said, magic already at her fingertips.

* * *

Getting them to Skyhold was the easy part, Lucy reflected. Anders and Fenris had been loath to split up the girls once they found each other again, and had been almost eager to catch up to one another. They were sweet together, Lucy thought. In Mama’s stories they had always seemed to be bickering.

Lucy got Anders to talk to her as they rode, listening carefully to his ridiculous stories about the Hero of Ferelden and her elven assassin/lover. Some of them were likely exaggerated—there was no way that anyone would ever need a magic tree branch for anything, let alone to save a pack of werewolves from the Dalish, and no one in their right minds would dump the future King of Ferelden for an Antivan Crow—but others were at least partially true. Lucy listened carefully to the tale of how the young lord Connor was saved from demonic possession, the name Lady Morrigan seared into her mind.

Lucy was, in her heart of hearts, a people person. It was a skill of greater use to her even than her magic and after so long with only the occasional rescued slave and Fenris to talk to, she was eager to get back to honing it. She endeared herself to the inquisitor, first. Then the ambassador, then the ambassador’s red haired friend. It was the spymaster who told Lucy everything she needed to know, and the ambassador who quietly agreed Lucy would be provided with anything she might need, no matter how absurd the cost.

In the end, Lucy did not even have to approach Lady Morrigan herself. The enchantress did it for her.

“Small girl,” the woman called across the garden.

Lucy greeted her with a curtsy. “Lady Morrigan.”

“’tis most unfortunate,” Morrigan began, “but it seems I have misplaced my grimoire.”

“That’s terrible,” Lucy said cautiously.

“Indeed.” Morrigan inspected her nails. “There are terribly powerful rituals in there. Particularly at the pages I have bookmarked for closer inspection. It would not do for it to fall into the wrong hands.”

“Would not do indeed,” Lucy echoed, using all the restraint she had not to grin. “Where did you have it last, may I ask? It would be an honor to help you look.”

* * *

Grace did not have her sister’s flair for interpersonal interaction. She kept to herself, mostly, and she doubted that most in Skyhold even realized Marian Hawke had more than one daughter.

But what she lacked in relationships she made up for in intelligence, in raw drive. She pored over the fade ritual obsessively. She spoke to the flighty mustached Tevinter in the library. He gave her books. She read them all in one sitting and asked for more. He gave her thicker ones, more complex. The nature of the Fade itself, of its spirits.

She spoke to the tranquil woman about nonmagical demon protection. She practiced drawing Helisma’s sigils until her fingers cramped, then recited litanies until her throat gave out.

She got subtle, powerful recipes from the brilliant mage woman on the balcony, flashy, destructive ones from the mad alchemist lady in the tavern.

She also spoke to the spirit who lived in the tavern roof. Grace spoke to him most of all. He taught her how to have a body, even when you did not have one at all. He didn’t mind that she took notes during their conversations, or that they would occasionally lapse into thoughtful silence. Cole never asked Grace to say what she felt. He already knew, and knew it didn’t bear repetition. Grace rather thought she had not found another person whose company she enjoyed so much since Lucy was born.

When the day came, Lucy brought Anders and Fenris and magic and a whole room filled with lyrium. Grace brought her notes.

* * *

“This is an unbelievably dangerous idea,” Fenris groused.

“You voice your objection now, while we’re in a ritual circle in a room half filled with other people’s lyrium?” Anders asked.

“I brought it up earlier. Repeatedly. In fact I daresay I have objected to this plan every single time it has been mentioned.”

“That’s true,” said Lucy.

“We’re still doing it,” said Grace  
.  
“As it happens, I agree with Fenris. This is an absurd risk,” Anders told them.

Lucy’s small face darkened. “She’s our mother. We are not leaving her in the fade.”

“I didn’t mean you should,” Anders continued doggedly. “I meant that you two should let me go and get her.”

“Let _us_ go,” Fenris corrected. He was pale, already sweating, but his words were firm and no one objected to them.

Grace raked her eyes over the two men, but it was Lucy who spoke first. “Fine. But take Grace’s notes. You’ll need them to bring Mama back.”

Anders nodded. “I would not dream of leaving them.”

Grace handed over her notes with a curt nod and a firm squeeze of Anders’ hand. “Be safe.”

Lucy hugged Fenris, careful not to disturb the swirling designs she and Grace had painstakingly painted onto the floor. The lyrium in the paint Grace concocted pulsed in tune with Fenris’ markings. “Don’t die up there, please?” Lucy mumbled into Fenris’ shoulder.

“I shall endeavor to return to you,” Fenris told them.

“You know what to do if a demon—“ Anders began.

Grace hefted her staff, business end first.

“Good girls.”

They began the ritual.

* * *

The thing that was the biggest crock of shit about the Fade, Hawke reasoned, was that no matter what you tended to get lost here.

At least her feet were never tired. Strictly speaking she wasn’t sure she really had feet anymore. Though she certainly had enough form to find the current swath of swamp weeds, which had not been here yesterday thank you very much, annoying.

She did eventually find the desire demon she had been tracking, though. It was easy because they all tended to look a bit like purpler versions of Anders or Fenris.

This one was the Fenris model. “Smiley, dinner!” Hawke called as soon as the demon opened its mouth. She was not in the mood to toy with fake-Fenris tonight. Today? Didn’t matter. Hard to tell. She was definitely losing track of things.

The nightmare loped over and crushed the smaller demon in its pincers. Hawke patted its leg as if it was an obedient hound. Well, she had probably had uglier dogs at some point.

For a few days (months? hours?) there had been a rock near here. It was her favorite rock. She had been using it to keep track of how many demons she had killed, but now it was gone. It seemed like that sort of thing happened a lot around her.

For a while she had tried looking for rifts, but she always wound up getting more lost than she had been to start out with. And besides, she couldn’t really just topple out of a hole anymore, could she? Had to have a body to do that.

She had a body. It had been quite disconcerting when she had first found herself standing next to it. Then it had become downright distressing when her corpse began to smell.

She tried reanimating it, just to see if she could, but she had never been a gifted necromancer in the best situations, and the best situation was probably not “dead (but possibly also immortal?) in the Fade.”

At least her body rarely moved. The stench of her rotten flesh had become a disgusting sort of landmark. A home base to head back to. Not that she needed any of the amenities of a camp. She never needed sleep anymore, apparently was freed from any concerns involving a need to eat or drink as well, and Hawke was fairly certain she had not peed for four months. Possibly longer.

Still, it was always nice to see a familiar face. Even if it was her own. And also had gone a bit off.

She was sitting near her corpse, contemplating this, when she heard a voice behind her, free of all the fade’s distortion.

“Hawke?”

* * *

The worst part was the waiting. The ritual had begun, and Fenris had pulsed blue, as Lucy had expected. A heartbeat later Anders had also pulsed blue, which Lucy had not expected. Then nothing, expected or otherwise, happened at all for a very long time.

Once every fifteen minutes or so, Grace would stand, walk quietly around their circle, and check each man’s pulse. Each time, Lucy felt herself holding her breath until Grace pronounced them both fine. Or, if not fine, at least not dead yet.

Then Grace would place a concerned hand to Lucy’s forehead. “Are you all right?”

Lucy nodded, trying to keep concentrating on the power flowing through her. She could feel the pulse of the lyrium behind her. Burning up, evaporating as she struggled to maintain focus.

Raiding slaver parties much larger than they were, Fenris had taught Lucy the value of knowing how to wait. It had never been anything like this. No sustained drain on her power, no complex ritual. Just hours of stillness and then everything broke loose, all fire and lightning and ice and run and fade step.

She and Fenris were good at that, many chases ending with them laughing, breathless, on the other side of a thick wall of solid rock while a Venatori tried to figure out how they could have just vanished.

Lucy clung to the image, pressing her nails into her palms until her hands bled. Grace was quiet, watching anxiously. She could not wait like Lucy could. Had never learned how to do it. The pulse checks grew more frequent as the day wore on into nighttime.

There was a pop, a small wrinkle in the fabric of the air.

“Oh sweet Maker, I have feet again.”

Everything broke loose.

* * *

_Oh sweet Maker, I have feet again,_ were admittedly not the strongest coming back to life lines Hawke could have come up with for her entrance, but given the time she had had, she thought she could be forgiven.

 

And forgiven she was. Both of her girls launched themselves into Hawke’s arms. Arms, Hawke was surprised to note, that were just as warm and sturdy as her eldest daughter’s meticulous notes on corporeal spirits said they ought to be.

It was a nice change from dead, Hawke reckoned. Especially when she turned to find Anders and Fenris, both newly conscious and staring at her with wonder and love and an aching sort of relief. There was no jealousy between the two men, no competition. They each had one hand clutched tight around the other’s and were reaching towards Hawke with the empty ones. Hawke, for her part, laughed until tears began to form. They were home.

* * *

“So what kind of a spirit are you?” Varric asked.

Hawke was wedged between Anders and Fenris, who had a daughter each in their laps, and was doing her best to make up for the almost-year in which she had not eaten.

Hawke shrugged. “The kind lucky enough to be able to drink ale again, I suppose.”

Varric had also switched back to the tavern swill. No one who wanted to keep their jaws in the proper location had a word to say about it. “Yeah, but aren’t you supposed to represent a virtue or something? You know,” Varric jerked his head towards Anders, then towards the ceiling where Cole lived, “Justice? Compassion? We met a spirit of Command in Crestwood. That was some weird shit.”

“Oh, I’m probably the embodiment of Perfection, then.” Hawke told him.

Grace and Lucy both rolled their eyes and Varric was quietly nearly brought to tears by the thought that they could take Hawke for granted again. “What about alcoholism? Or gluttony? Is gluttony a virtue?”

“Tom foolery?” Isabela suggested. “Unbridled lust?”

“Could be it,” Hawke agreed, affable as ever. “Charisma? Charm?”

“Not likely,” Varric snorted. “Have you met yourself?”

“I know what it is,” Lucy said. She squeezed her mother’s hand but didn’t say anything more.

“As do I,” Fenris confirmed. Anders and Grace simply nodded, leaning in close and warm.

Watching them, Varric realized that, though it would seem gauche to say it aloud, he too had known all along.

**Author's Note:**

> Say hi at [Eugenideswalksintoabar](http://eugenideswalksintoabar.tumblr.com)


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